This paper explores the potential contribution of the policy and practice of comprehensive extraction to the achievement and maintenance of social licensing for NORM industries.Given the increasing difficulty worldwide of engaging with stakeholders and gaining social acceptance of mining projects of any nature,the concept of disturbing the ground only once and extracting all resources of value for current or future use is highly attractive.This approach,and the underpinning assumptions of sustainable development on which it rests,was (re) introduced by Zhong et al.at an IAEA Technical Meeting,September 2011 and has rapidly gained acceptance.The initial focus has been on the feasibility of reengineering flow sheets for managing and processing phosphate-related resources,such as P,U,REE and Th in a comprehensive manner.But the recent recognition that oil and gas deposits are often found collocated with the phosphate resources,at least on a regional if not local basis,suggests an even more radical rethink around the concept of an "energy basin",managed as a single complex entity,may be the true implication of the comprehensive method.At a minimum,it seems to satisfy contemporary stockholder and stakeholder requirements for measuring Triple Bottom Line (economic,social,and environmental) indicators of performance and outcome.It will also encourage engineers to explore the co-dependence between stakeholder mapping and designing new flow sheets.This will be the crux,because the appeal of the concept of comprehensive extraction is in equal measure cultural and contextual in the sense defined by Brundtland (1987).It invites those exploring,reporting and extracting such resources to think of optimising the entire value of the resource to a given community at a given time,across a complete life-cycle,rather than draining single commodities for a one-off return.This is likely to have significant potential benefit for the social licensing process.The case can at least be put that mining and processing is henceforth to be seen as an act of harnessing and managing the geological endowment for the general good,investors included,not just asset stripping for the few.But if the case proves robust,it may as well entail a taxonomic benefit of rendering the definition of the term NORM industry itself more coherent and consistent and hence simpler,and much more powerful.To date,to be termed a "NORM industry" an activity is essentially part of a heterogeneous mix of more than a dozen industries that share the apparently accidental attribute of dealing with naturally occurring radionuclides.If however,geological genetics demonstrate that there are actually causal connections between the minerals these industries process,(the energy basin) and compelling economic and environmental reasons for managing them in a "joined-up" comprehensive manner,then not only will the term NORM itself normalise,it will also socialise into the discourse of public good and social licensing.